The April Invasion of Veracruz

MEXICO CITY — The invasion had various objectives. To help remove a dictator who had seized power in a coup d’état, to channel and direct the radical groups that opposed him, to safeguard the interests of the oil companies active in the area, to forestall interference from other national powers, and to teach the citizens of an unfortunate country about the virtues of democracy. Baghdad in 2003? No. The Mexican port of Veracruz, on April 21, 1914.

For Europeans and Americans, 1914 marks the beginning of World War I. For Mexicans, it is synonymous with the “American intervention,” a smaller encore of the Mexican-American War of 1846-1848 that cost Mexico half its territory and that in 1879 former President Ulysses S. Grant dubbed as America’s most “wicked” war.

When the expeditionary force (some 6,500 Marines and soldiers under the command of Vice Admiral Frank F. Fletcher) disembarked on April 21, there were still elderly Veracruzans who could remember, with horror, the naval bombardments of February 1847 ordered by General Winfield Scott. Bombs had rained down on hospitals, churches, public and private buildings, and had been followed by scenes of rape, pillage, robbery and killings by the invaders. Six hundred Mexican civilians died. The future commanding general of the Confederacy, Captain Robert E. Lee, wrote to his wife: “My heart bled for the inhabitants.”

The 1914 intervention was less bloody, its violent period lasting only a couple of days. President Woodrow Wilson’s stated intention was to block a shipment of arms from Germany to the Mexican dictator Victoriano Huerta. But the citizens of Veracruz did not passively accept the invasion of their city, already caught up in the Mexican Revolution.

In the United States, there were voices of opposition as well — but also rapid support. The tabloid press of William Randolph Hearst, as it had done with Cuba in 1898, not only rallied behind the landing in Veracruz but campaigned for invading the entire country. The writer Jack London, who combined a measure of revolutionary sentiment with a racist ethic of white supremacy, wrote in Collier’s magazine: “Verily, the Veracruzans will long remember this being conquered by the Americans, and yearn for the blissful day when the Americans will conquer them again. They would not mind thus being conquered to the end of time.”

In fact, the Veracruzans reacted with rage. The American military did not have to confront a regular army. (General Huerta’s federal troops had been ordered away from the city.) It was the people of Veracruz — masons, police officers, carpenters, street sweepers, shopkeepers, students of the Naval Academy, even prisoners — who resisted. Almost every Veracruzan family treasures the memory of at least one heroic act: the young Judith Oropeza who threw bricks from her rooftop at the Americans; the prostitute nicknamed “America” who set her ammunition belt on a flat roof and fired down at the “gringos”; the artillery lieutenant José Azueta who, all by himself, with an antiquated machine gun, covered the retreat of his comrades at the Naval Academy who had been battling the Americans. By the end of the fighting, 193 Mexicans had died (including Lieutenant Azueta) along with 19 American soldiers.

The American intervention plainly failed to achieve its objectives. It contributed only marginally to General Huerta’s fall a few months later, and had little influence on the outcome of Mexico’s civil war. The expeditionary force remained in the city for seven months before leaving it in the hands of Venustiano Carranza’s Constitutionalist army, a less revolutionary faction than those headed by the popular caudillos Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata. Without any need for protective American Marines, the oil wells of the area, with their copious production, remained untouched until the end of the civil war. The European powers — especially England and Germany — pulled back from Mexico, though their withdrawal from the scene had nothing to do with the American intervention: World War I had broken out. And Wilson, of course, did not succeed in “teaching democracy to the Mexicans.”

What the intervention did achieve was the renewal of rancor among Mexicans. Thousands of Veracruzans went quietly into internal exile, avoiding any cooperation with the invaders. Only a minority of civic employees were willing to work with the Americans’ provisional government. A parallel Mexican administration attended to the needs of the people. And Mexican nationalism underwent a surge — with profound and long-lasting consequences.

The experience of Veracruz sheds light on the nationalism of other Caribbean countries, such as the Dominican Republic, Nicaragua and especially Cuba. In each of these countries, deep resentment was sparked by the physical presence of the invader. In Cuba, the United States went to the extreme of establishing what amounted to a protectorate based on the total identification of American foreign policy with American private interests. As a result, in 1922, a Cuban journalist predicted that “hatred for the North Americans will become the religion of Cubans.”

We are now near the end of this cycle. Since the invasion of Panama (in 1989) , American Marines have not come ashore on Latin American beaches. The identification of American diplomacy with the interests of its large, private enterprises is less evident. And the understandably anti-Yankee discourse of Fidel Castro became an artificial rhetoric for Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez and then a caricature for his successor, Nicolás Maduro. In the meantime, commerce and migration have grown so large and steady as to file down the old harsh points of contention.

Will an American president be willing to examine this long history of resentment and distrust, the better to construct a “happy ending” to these conflicts with “the other America”? Concrete actions are required: to pass long-awaited reforms of immigration laws, increase commercial relations and encourage mutual understanding, nourish cultural exchanges, lift the embargo on Cuba, close Guantánamo, and to be much more attentive and respectful toward Latin American countries and not treat them as the mere backyard of the nation they call “the Giant of the North.”

And also, at this time of year, a simple gesture: to remember the dead of April 1914 in the Mexican port of Veracruz.

Enrique Krauzeis a historian, the editor of the literary magazine Letras Libres and the author of “Redeemers: Ideas and Power in Latin America.” This article was translated by Hank Heifetz from the Spanish.